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In Newark, Proposing a First Step in Regulating Guns

Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark and Gov. Jon S. Corzine discussed proposed gun-control legislation Thursday, following the murders of three young people in a schoolyard earlier this month.Credit
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times

NEWARK, Aug. 16 — In the latest in a series of law-enforcement steps following the killing of three people here 12 days ago, Mayor Cory A. Booker unveiled what he called a “model ordinance” on Thursday that would make it easier for the police to track illegal firearms back to the places where they were purchased.

The new policy calls for local laws that would require the registration of all firearms in Newark and the reporting of lost or stolen guns. And though there are currently no gun dealers in the city, another ordinance would prevent any future ones from selling in residential areas or near schools.

“There was no local municipal ordinance dealing with gun crime, dealing with gun violence, or dealing with the regulation of guns whatsoever within the city of Newark,” Mr. Booker noted. “If you are a legal gun owner and your gun gets stolen, right now you just go about your business and that gun can now be involved in criminality.”

If the proposed ordinances, which must be dealt with by the City Council, are approved, he promised, “There will be culpability.”

Gov. Jon S. Corzine and Attorney General Anne Milgram joined several New Jersey mayors at a news conference announcing the proposed new measures, and added a proposal of their own: gun courts, though details of how they would operate remain more than a little bit sketchy.

“The goal is to fast-track these cases, to prioritize the most serious gun crimes,” Ms. Milgram said, adding, “We haven’t defined yet what gun cases will go to the judge or judges who will handle this.”

New Jersey has some of the strictest gun-purchasing laws in the nation, with criminal-background checks and licenses required for both handguns and long guns — weapons like rifles or shotguns — but Mr. Booker said on Thursday that in tracing guns seized from Newark juveniles in 2000, officials found that 47 percent were purchased in the state.

Still, law enforcement officials say that most of the illegal firearms in the state — more than 60 percent of them handguns — come from Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Georgia and the Carolinas.

The new proposals come as many cities throughout the country, include Baltimore and Philadelphia, grapple with a spike in homicides that their leaders attribute largely to the availability of guns. In Newark, overall crime is down, but the fatal shooting of three young people in a school playground has drawn attention to the stubbornly high homicide rate.

But Newark’s police director, Garry F. McCarthy, said that tracking the guns would be a significant challenge, noting that the local police did not even collect data about the weapons until six weeks ago.

“Right now, we don’t have any intelligence,” he said. “How can we address the problem in the fashion we want to?”

Federal data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives fills in parts of the trafficking picture, and can be shared with local police departments.

But a federal provision known as the Tiahrt amendment, which has been attached to every Congressional spending bill since 2003, prevents trace data from being used in civil suits against gun dealers and manufacturers.

The Police Department has its own ballistics testing system, one of only about 200 nationwide provided by the federal bureau, which allows investigators to analyze bullet fragments and shell casings to determine which gun they came from.

However, such a determination can be made only if the gun — or another bullet fired from it — is already in the bureau’s database.

Even as the politicians were gathered here to announce the proposed new measures on guns, the state’s chief justice announced that a retired judge would review how bail was set on previous charges against Jose Lachira Carranza, an illegal immigrant who is one of two prime suspects in the schoolyard slayings.

Mr. Carranza, 28, was free on $150,000 bail at the time of the slayings, though he had assault and child-rape charges pending. Neither the police departments that arrested him nor the prosecutor’s office had questioned his immigration status; had they determined he was in the country illegally, federal immigration officials have said, they would probably have blocked his release.

Ms. Milgram’s office is already reviewing the system’s handling of Mr. Carranza and expects to produce a report within a month.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: In Newark, Proposing a First Step in Regulating Guns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe